Page 45 of Almost Home
I turned on one foot and began walking as fast as my angry knee would allow, silently willing him to continue on his merry way.
“I’m not leaving you, so you might as well let me walk with you.”
I shot him a scowl that got waylaid by the sight of him with the mountains as a backdrop.Goodness, he was handsome. Not a man anyone would ever call pretty, but good-looking in a more unpracticed way than either of his brothers, though they weren’t particularly high maintenance men or anything. Wilder just had this aggressively attractive aura that snapped at me, as if baiting me into engaging with it.
The fact that I was walking alongside him on this gorgeous early May afternoon and thinking about hisauraindicated that I definitely should’ve had a snack before this run.
“You really don’t have to. It’s fine to walk on, I just couldn’t keep running. I might even be able to jog a bit more soon.” I glanced over at him to find his gaze steady on me. My heart tripped over itself and splattered on the ground in front of me.
“I was doing an out and back. This is my last mile anyway. I don’t mind cooling down with you.”
A memory flickered to life in my mind—this very same path, though it hadn’t been paved back then. “Do you remember when you were getting ready to talk to the recruiter, so you trained for the physical fitness test?”
He huffed a laugh and his eyes tracked out in front of him. “I’d never been a runner. Thought two miles was going to kill me that first time.”
“You had the sit-ups no problem. Push-ups took a few weeks.” I could see it all so vividly. He’d planned to go ROTC when we graduated high school. We’d go to the same college and he’d start the program, then commission and start active duty as an officer.
Then everything changed. I found out I was pregnant, and he decided he’d get started sooner—enlist and start bringing in a paycheck. We could get married as soon as I graduated. It’d seemed insane, and yet like the right thing. We’d be young but together, and we’d even have health insurance and housing.
An all-too-familiar ache gripped my insides and squeezed. What would life have been like if I hadn’t lost the baby? If we’d gone ahead with our plans?
Since he’d gotten back and we’d been thrown together more and more, I’d found myself thinking about who that baby might’ve grown to be. For so long, I’d shied away from thinking about the what-ifs, but in the last few years, I’d realized that hadn’t helped me. It’d only kept me blinded to how I’d continued to hurt the man I loved while also stunting my own healing.
No more of that, now. No more hurting him, or myself. I’d come for peace, on a mission suggested by my therapist in Georgia, and I’d experienced a taste of it. I’d also learned that being fearful about remembering didn’t serve me or anyone else.
Maybe she would be in college. Maybe he would’ve joined the Army, too. Maybe she would’ve repeated history and had a baby young with her first love, and Wilder and I would’ve been the happiest grandparents to ever exist.
It wasn’t very fair to my heart to think that way, but I’d accepted it wasn’t any more fair to forbid such daydreams. At some point, I needed to find out if he’d ever had similar thoughts.
“True. Though I still hate push-ups.” The grit in his voice said maybe he’d gone there, too—back to where everything had unraveled.
I didn’t want to stay there when we werehere. We’d made our choices after the biggest one had been made for us, and beyond that, we’d survived. Somehow, we were back in this place that’d been so formative for us, and yet that we’d both run from for so long.Too long.
Maybe that was why I refused to linger in the past and tried opening the conversation again with him. I’d come back because it was the last place I’d felt at home and truly happy. The last place I’d felt fully loved—not just by Wilder but by his family and even mine. I still grappled with feeling that was true, but I’d grieved my relationship with my parents almost constantly the last year and a half since moving here and receiving a steady drip of disapproval from them all along.
Enough of that, because here we were now. A new moment in the mountain air, a chance to move forward.
“How about the running? I guess you made your peace with it?” I looked over right as he did the same.
His gaze made my stomach swoop low again, my heart twisting and twisting in my chest until it felt it might give out. Being around him had been fraught with a crush of feelings since that first time months ago, but this bordered on unbearable.
I wanted to press myself against him, to meld together and share every stunted thought and regret and hope. I needed him to know the way I’d loved him before and how deeply, completely sorry I was for so many years apart.
He stopped walking and his hand, warm and strong, came to my wrist. Those deep blue eyes pinned me in place, all the intensity in the world funneling through them.
“Go to dinner with me.”
My breath came out in a rough whoosh and I said the first thing I thought of. “I have plans tonight.”
Idiot!I didn’t want that to sound like a refusal. I just, I did have plans tonight, and I couldn’t cancel them. I needed to process some of the things that’d happened, and now I needed it even more.
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
His fingers squeezed ever so slightly where they rested against my arm, and then he let go. His head was still dipped down, and for a heartbeat, I thought he’d cover the distance and kiss me.Yes, please.
“Tomorrow,” he repeated, as though in answer to my body’s plea for more from him. Of him. With him.Anythinghim.
